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Otterbein University will stop requiring students involved in sexual-assault cases to sign confidentiality agreements, after student journalists discovered that the school was violating federal law.

After initially denying it, an official at the private liberal-arts school in Westerville told reporters for the student newspaper on Monday that he didn’t realize Otterbein had had victims, as well as others, sign a nondisclosure clause. The requirement is being dropped.

“Otterbein will be seeking legal counsel to better understand the rights of our students and the institution,” Otterbein’s vice president of Student Affairs, Bob Gatti, told The Dispatch in an email last night.

The privacy clause has been removed from a judicial administrative checklist that students receive once an assault is reported, Gatti said. The university also will make other changes if necessary.

“We support open conversation and actively encouraging students to seek counsel from campus or off-campus resources,” he added.

Earlier this week, Gatti told the student reporters that the nondisclosure clause was included in the form to conform with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act — FERPA — which prevents colleges from releasing student academic records, such as grades.

But public-records advocates said FERPA is not intended to allow schools to hide crimes.

“We just followed the bread crumbs,” said Chelsea Coleman, a 21-year-old journalism and public-relations major from Gahanna who wrote the Tan & Cardinal story with another student.

Requiring students to sign a confidentiality agreement is a direct violation of the Clery Act, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The act requires schools that participate in federal student-aid programs to disclose campus crime information and notify victims of their rights to report assaults to law-enforcement officials. It is named for Jeanne Ann Clery, who was raped and murdered in her dorm room at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania in 1986.

“We have specifically stated in two cases that schools cannot place preconditions on a student’s right to receive information about outcomes reached and sanctions imposed by a disciplinary board in a sexual-assault case,” the Education Department said in an email.

In 2004, the department advised Georgetown University that the school’s policy of requiring a campus rape victim to sign a confidentiality agreement before receiving the outcome of any disciplinary action against an assailant was illegal.

Four years later, it ruled that the University of Virginia violated federal law by threatening victims of sexual assault if they talked about their cases. In both cases, the schools defended their confidentiality policies, saying they were simply trying to protect the privacy of all students involved.

An Education Department spokeswoman said she couldn’t say whether a complaint has been made about Otterbein.

It’s difficult to tell just how many schools use confidentiality agreements in sexual-assault cases, advocates say, because students often are threatened with suspension or legal action if they talk.

“Secrecy is self-perpetuating. Once you tell people not to talk, people aren’t going to break their silence,” said Frank LaMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va.

LaMonte suspects that as many as “seven or eight out of every 10 colleges and universities” have students sign non-disclosure forms. He said that in the past two months, he has been approached by two women who said they had been assaulted and were looking for legal help after their schools didn’t take their complaints seriously.